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How to retire on a boat at 40

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Irish Leonard explains how his family of four lives on a sailboat. No inheritance. No lottery. Just not wasting money - or his time.


How does he afford it? He explains by showing the average Irish household expenses, converted into hours worked. Here's the result shown as a working week:


We work a lot to pay for our cars. As he puts it:
Almost 20% of our working lives is spent so that we can afford to get to our working lives.

So Leonard eliminates or massively reduces most expenses. On the family boat, he sails "in a climate that requires no heating or air conditioning, doesn't own a car and generates what energy he needs using solar panels".

Remove the unnecessary costs and you remove most of the need to work. He calculates that we can feed and clothe our family on 5 days work per month, or the equivalent. By contrast the average Irish couple devotes 19 hours a day to work, including commuting.

Why all this focus on time?

In Leonard's words "I'm not saying we should try to hoard hours, because we can't. They're going. Every hour." But we should get value from them.

The time bank-account

Imagine hours are like money in the bank. At birth you get a life's hours put in your account. You choose how to spend them.

Here's what normally happens (by Leonard's analysis):

613,000 hours to start with. But we sleep for a third of that.

408,000 waking hours. For many we are kids or in education.

292,000 waking hours left at 20 years of age. (Half the starting amount)

Then the working world comes along; "All we need now is most of your waking hours for the next 45 years."

All they leave in our time-bank account is...

30,000 waking hours. Less than 5% of what we were born with.

Do we sell ourselves too cheaply?

Leonard asks rhetorically how much we'd pay at the end of our lives just to get a few hours back. To enjoy a few more of the things we love to do.

His follow up question is that given the value of our time why do we sell it so cheaply, "often doing things that we don't particularly enjoy to get things we don't particularly want or need"?

It's a good question - and it's difficult to think of a satisfactory answer.

You don't even need a boat

Living on a boat was Leonard's way of doing this but there are many others. His key points are that we often don't need as much money as we think and that our hours are far too valuable to trade them cheaply for stuff we don't really need or want.

I was at a friend's apartment-warming party this weekend. She doesn't own a car and avoids buy anything new wherever possible. Her industry has an abundance of highly-paid casual work. Our mental maths says 2-3 months of work per year would be easily enough for her eco-friendly lifestyle.

It's not "early retirement" but it is another version of a work-optional life.

Related reading

Read more about the Work Optional life or see the trailer for the early retirement documentary.

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Comments

  1. Laura12 December 2019 at 10:42

    I love the concept of thinking in terms of time rather than in dollars! I think I might do the same thing he did and map out my work hours in terms of where I spend it...

    ReplyDelete
  2. david24 December 2019 at 08:14

    That sounds fascinating Laura. I look forward to seeing it. :)

    ReplyDelete

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